Human-caused water pollution has become a major, life-threatening problem for humans and other living species all over the earth. We need to be cleaning it up.

Although we have a tendency to blame major polluters for being callous and greedy, until citizens started taking notice and talking about it, most of our polluting was actually unconscious. Because of public awareness, many polluters have progressed from dumping unthinkingly to slowly recognizing the problem and trying to change their production processes. Federal and state governments have also passed laws that restrict pollution (though many of those laws are being gutted by the current administration).

However, there is something you and I can do to encourage necessary changes, starting with changing our attitude from not really caring to showing how much we care by the way we act.

"When making a fire, people often like to join you. When cleaning the ashes you are often alone."

— African proverb

4 Pollution Solutions

Solution 1: Change in Attitude

Any problem caused by humans can be cleared up by humans. That includes water pollution. Instead of being discouraged at the amount of trash and/or contamination there is to clean up, we can encourage companies to clean up now, using both legal and voluntary prevention (including fines) as a goad to stop additional pollution.

Keeping each other well informed about existing polluters is key. Just as Wikileaks has caused a scramble in governments worldwide to clean up their acts, so publicizing information about polluters has caused many of them to start scrambling to clean up theirs.

This will increase as the public begins more and more to link pollution together with irresponsibility—to talk about what they see, writing letters to government representatives and major polluters, and to take action themselves to clean up pollution. Here is what the public is doing to clean up the American River in California.

Solution 2: Raise Your Kids Well

Children develop attitudes that then guide their entire lives. This includes those who grow up to be corporate leaders and polluters. Here is an analogy that all parents can identify with:

You want to encourage your children to grow up responsibly, so you teach them these things:

To treat each other and you with respect,

The value of hard work and love for the environment,

To clean up after themselves—they can play and get as messy as they want to, but they have to clean up after they've finished.

If corporate leaders were to grow up expecting to have to clean up after themselves, we would have far less pollution to deal with than we do now. Raising children with these values is a role that parents can play to help clean up our polluted environment.

Instead, people who did grow up responsibly are forming teams all across the world to manually clean up non-toxic pollution that washes up onto river banks. Here is a website that provides advice for how to set up a team.

Nonprofit organizations are setting up projects that dredge trash from the middle of the river as well, like Project Aware—a multi-day boating project in Iowa.

Solution 3: Organic Farming

Here is the end result when children who grow up irresponsibly become adults:

40% of U.S. lakes, rivers, and streams are unsafe for fishing or swimming, per the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), even after passage of the US Clean Water Act in 1977. US President Trump is now trying to gut that act.

There are more than 300,000 existing contaminated groundwater sites. Cleaning them up could cost the government $1 trillion and take over 30 years, per the US National Research Council—or more if companies keep polluting.

Per the EPA, eliminating pollution from agriculture alone could save over $15 billion in construction of advanced water treatment facilities—which have to keep upgrading to filter out the newest pollutants.

The best solution to pollutants coming from agriculture is what German water utilities are doing. They are saving money by paying farmers to switch to organic farming—which is cheaper for them than trying to clean up pollution caused by pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers, and other pollutants industrial farmers use.

Switching to organic farming can take care of pollution caused by agribusiness, which is major, especially of our waterways. However there are lots of other types of polluters out there too.

Decomposing trash from this massive landfill is polluting the aquifer underneath. That means the drinking water for folks living nearby would be poisonous too, if it weren't for water utilities installing special equipment to clean it up. | Source

Solution 4: New Cleanup Technologies

Here are some of the pollution problems people are attempting to deal with by developing new technologies or pressing for action on problems with polluters:

Trash gyres filled with plastics growing in all four major oceans,

Landfills overflowing all over the world,

City and county groundwater too contaminated to drink,

Drinking wells all over the country poisoned by runaway mining and leaking oil pipes,

City drinking water tainted with throwaway pharmaceuticals.

Engineers and scientists worldwide are looking for and developing new technologies to help clean up existing pollution such as this. So are students, and they are winning awards for doing so. Following are links to projects being carried out to clean up ocean, river, and groundwater pollution.

Scientists are working worldwide to develop new pollution detection devices. Here a team is testing new tools in the Arctic Ocean. | Source

Ocean Pollution Cleanup Technologies

In addition to river outlets being filled with agricultural chemicals that kill fish, all five oceans now contain slowly rotating piles of garbage where their currents meet (gyres)—kind of like ocean landfills. The largest, most infamous gyre has been nicknamed the "North Pacific Garbage Patch." It spreads out to cover an area the size of Texas, consisting mostly of column after column of tiny pieces of plastic. The area, once a central feeding ground for ocean life, now collects trash that fish are filling their stomachs with, so they have no room for regular food and starve.

People have trashed lakes, rivers, and streams as well as the ocean. This water sinks down into the aquifer, taking the pollution down into our drinking water, leaving lighter trash by the shores, and moving the rest into the ocean. | Source

Freshwater Pollution Cleanup Technologies

Much of the pollution in the oceans gets there from freshwater rivers. Just as seafaring ships too often unload bilge water illegally into the oceans, so do freshwater boats into lakes and rivers.

Other major dumpers are factories, agri-business, mining and logging operations, and abbatoirs, all of which also use waterways as toilet flushes. This results in toxic chemicals, scrap metals and plastics, animal blood and guts, and innumerable other undesirable elements entering our water supply every day. All this pollution flows to the ocean and also goes into our groundwater where cleanup is difficult.

As a result, populations near polluted lakes and rivers started acquiring unexpected cancers and strange, reproductive anomalies in ever increasing amounts. Eventually, household water suppliers started building big, expensive treatment plants to take the pollutants out again, so the public could drink safely, and people started having to pay for the water they use.

Because the public recognized the danger of this kind of pollution much faster than they did ocean pollution, in 1977 we pushed the government to pass and enforce the Clean Water Act. This was intended to prevent additional pollution, and also to enable the government to help clean up existing pollution.

The EPA then developed a cleanup project for the Great Lakes that has since been postponed until 2020, so it can be "discussed" with the public. It also started a multi-year cleanup project for the New Bedford Harbor, which has been more productive.

New Bedford Harbor is a leading fishing port in the U.S, mainly focusing on scallops. Local electronics manufacturers were major polluters during the 1940s to mid '70s. Ships dumping bilge water over the side also pollute. | Source

Many states in the U.S. are carrying out cleanup projects as well, including Washington, Oregon, California, and states on the East Coast, many of which are joint projects with the federal government. Most are using prevention techniques—filtering water dumped by manufacturers before it enters the rivers—but some are working with native tribes and local inventors to develop both old and new ways of river cleanup.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the government of India established the Ganges Action Plan in 2015, which promotes and supports cleanup of the revered Ganges River through both technological and natural methods. Although many claim it is massively unfunded, compared to the amount of garbage in the river, the project seems to be working well.

Groundwater Pollution

Groundwater pollution is an inevitable result of land pollution. When a military facility or plastics manufacturer buries wastes in the ground, rainwater will wash those wastes down into the aquifer. All over the United States, neighbors of these types of facilities have sickened from such pollution, and many have died. The public was alerted to the danger when Erin Brockovich filed a contentious class action lawsuit against an energy company in California and, in the year 2000, collaborated in producing a Hollywood movie starring Julia Roberts. Many towns sued.

The Jet Propulsion Lab in California has a cleanup project that is removing old jet fuels from the groundwater in Pasadena and surrounding areas.

The groundwater treatment facility set up by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Altadena CA to clean up groundwater pollution from former toxic aerospace activity. | Source

Environmental Solutions to Pollution

Scientists and agriculturalists are discovering some interesting ways that nature has of cleaning up toxins in the environment. When blue-green algae invades a river or harbor, it's an indication that phosphorus is polluting the water. Using that indicator to locate and stop the pollution is a solution being used in China to clean its lakes.

Researchers have also discovered that mycelium—the underground plant of mushroom fruits—can convert toxins derived from oil into nutrients that soil microbes can break down further to feed plants. If landfill owners were to landscape the tops of old landfills with trees and mushrooms (they like shade), it's probable that toxins leaking into the groundwater would decompose before reaching it.

The same could be done with brownfield (lightly contaminated) and even SuperFund sites (heavily contaminated with chemicals and fuels). The Ocean Blue Project in Corvallis, Texas, is using mushrooms to clean up their local waterways.

This incredible book shows how the mushroom plant grows, communicates, and helps plants share nutrients under the soil. The new documentary, "Fantastic Fungi," is derived from this book and illustrates the process in action.

Water Pollution Prevention

The most frustrating thing about cleaning up pollution is the awareness that it will probably happen again. Why should people and organizations spend time and money to clean up waterways, if polluters just keep polluting?

For this reason, cleanup and prevention must go hand in hand. Those who clean up can link with those who would focus on prevention, giving them tips and data (what they're finding out there), taking photographs, and feeding them all the raw materials they need for advocacy or public relations work. Between cleanup solutions, pollution prevention, and nature's own cleanup processes the pollution problem can be conquered.

Rivers are also polluted by old boats and mechanical trash that nonprofits in California are cleaning out of the San Francisco Delta waterways.

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